JEANNIE RHYU is a Korean Canadian artist, based in Queens, New York, whose interdisciplinary practice spans across painting, printmaking, ceramic sculptures, and installation. Rhyu traces the roots of her emotional impressions by deconstructing and reimagining her cultural visual traditions, excavating the structural remnants of cultural collective memory. Her works focus on the displacement and dislocation of collected images and how they become distorted and transformed through translation and across generations, placing her within a long lineage of Korean modern artists of the 20th and 21st century who have embraced new movements like impressionism and surrealism while incorporating their individual experiences. The parallel global history of maritime culture and migratory experience inform Rhyu’s exploration of humanity’s place within the natural world. By researching ancient artifacts, ritual and ceremonial objects from museums, historic photographs from digital archives, and visual motifs from documented history, Rhyu discovers a symbolic language that connects her to her roots and inspires her future. Throughout Rhyu’s body of work, images of the fathomless ocean, migrating birds, intrepid seafarers, and the night sky resonate with generational wisdom that transcends borders. At the same time, she confronts a sense of grief and loss on a personal and universal scale, as the history of human exploration also provides a record of extinction and cultural misapprehension. From the deep primordial waters of generational wisdom, ancestral stories, and personal recollections, Rhyu’s emotional reality emerges, where she bridges the gaps between different cultural understandings through imagination and mythopoesis.
Jeannie Rhyu received a B.A. from Columbia University in the City of New York in Architecture and Visual Arts, and is a candidate for an M.F.A. at Columbia University School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally in shows in New York, New Bedford, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Seoul, Beijing, and London. Selected exhibitions include shows at New Bedford Art Museum (New Bedford), Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (New York), Harper’s Gallery (New York), Spring/Break Art Show (New York), The Border Gallery (New York), Seefood Room (Hong Kong), Shin Gallery (New York), Field Projects and Tutu Gallery (New York), and LeRoy Neiman Gallery (New York). She has given artist talks and workshops at Columbia University, 92nd Street Y, Kingsland Wildflowers, and other community organizations. When she isn’t making art, she works as a fellow at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies.
Portrait by Javier Griffey